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Courtship And Marriage In A Midsummer Night's Dream

1633 Words7 Pages

It is the first goal of our essay to understand how marriage and courtship in Shakespeare´s plays are an important exciting theme because it was something real during XVI century.

The objective of the essay is to examine how courtship and marriage affects the issues and formation of the play named A Midsummer Night´s Dream (The Malone Society, 1996) focusing on the social and emotional relationships between men and women. Consequently, the aims are: first, to show the importance of the female character in the play according to virginity, chastity and sexuality; second, to explain how love is treated in the play; and lastly, to illustrate how courtship and marriage are depicted through the characters. It is crucial to understand that all of …show more content…

They are the perfect example of difficulty of love, that is, passionate circumstances in which an injustice or discrepancy interferes in the consistency of the engagement. Finally, the habitual happy end in comedies is produced, although they have had problems to achieve it like the love potion; the second are Demetrius and Helena. Their relationship has evolved during the play. At first, Demetrius is in love with Hermia, but it is at the end when his love for Helena appears. However, Helena has been always in love with him. She is the only one that cares more about the essence of love. In fact, when the two Athenians boys love the same woman she says: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”(I.i.234). With that sentence, she is referring to the beauty of Hermia that impedes Demetrius from noticing the virtues of Helena; and finally, the last couple is Theseus and Hyppolyta. They appear at the beginning and at the end of the play, being imperceptible for the rest of the comedy. Both characters symbolize reliability and order, while in the most of the play exist indecision, inconsistency and darkness. Consequently, their courtship represents confidence and stability. That representation is seen as the end of the comedy when the routine and normality returns (Lyons

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